On several occasions, particularly on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, dead people were suspected of being revenants or vampires, and consequently dug up and destroyed. Some contemporary authors named this phenomenon Magia Posthuma. This blog is dedicated to understanding what happened and why.

Saturday, 9 July 2011

De sagis magisque posthumis

For some years tranquil peace ruled in Moravia, but then ...

As Google Books put more and more books online, one can get to check up on some more references, and I recently noticed the Moraviæ historia politica et ecclesiastica from 1787 by Adolf Pilarz and František Adolf Moravec, i.e. a political and church history of Moravia. In the third part of the book, Pilarz and Moravetz note that after The War of the Austrian Succession, peace ruled in Moravia, and the area flourished for some years. However ... two kinds of superstitions infested Moravia, one of them being what 'the Hungarians call Vampires'. More precisely, Moravetz writes: 'de sagis magisque posthumis, quos Hungari passim Vampyros vocant,' which links posthumous witches and magicians with vampires.

The authors call this superstition an ancient (vetustus) error which has moved from the East (Oriens) to Poland, Hungary and Moravia, and defines it is a common belief that corpses of witches and magicians buried in cemetries return animated by a demon to suck the blood of the living. And, as we would expect, this belief is related to the find of cadavers full of blood and incorrupted (sanguine plena, atque incorrupta), although these signs can be explained through natural means.

Pilarz and Moravetz then refer to a specific case, the well-known incident dated December 22 1754 concerning a woman of Polish background, Rosina Polakin, whose body was hardly corrupted after thirty days, and consequently cremated along with a number of other corpses. Baron and court physician van Swieten, however, refuted the belief, and Empress Maria Theresia in 1755 ordered these acts of superstition to be stopped.

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Magia Posthuma is the title of a book written by the Catholic lawyer Karl Ferdinand von Schertz in 1704. In the book von Schertz examines the case of a spectre that roamed about and harmed the living. Several of these cases were known in Moravia where von Schertz published his book, as well as in neighbouring areas. Only two decades later, a similar case was investigated by Austrian officials in North Eastern Serbia. The local people called the spectre a vampire. This incident inspired the deacon Michael Ranft to publish a study on the mastication of the dead. Just a few years later, in 1732, another case of vampirism was investigated in Serbia. Reports of this investigation were published throughout Europe with the consequence that the interest in vampires exploded. Vampires became the topic of numerous learned articles and books. Cases of magia posthuma or vampirism, however, kept occurring. In 1755 empress Maria Theresa aided by her court physician Gerard van Swieten began passing laws against the exhumation and destruction of corpses as well as other acts of superstition. Within decades, however, vampires caught the imagination of poets and authors of gothic fiction. Subsequently popularized by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula and numerous movies, vampires have become part of everyday modern mythology, but the historical and cultural background has not yet been fully explored and understood. In fact, the modern conception of the vampiric count bears little or no resemblance to the revenants of the 18th century, and several modern books rather obscure than enlighten us on the early modern European revenants and vampires. This blog is an informal and personal contribution to the enterprise of exploring and understanding what happened and why.